The Price of Disobedience at the Church of Sacrifice: Midnight Axe Murders
In the winter dark of Cajun country, an axe moved from cabin to cabin along the railroad, as if the tracks themselves were drawing a blood-red line from Rayne to San Antonio. Doors locked from the inside. Windows left just wide enough. Families posed like offerings. Newspapers spoke of voodoo, of a “Church of Sacrifice,” of a teenage girl who laughed on the witness stand and later claimed she had caressed the dead. What followed was a tangle of confession, recantation, copycats, and folklore so thick that more than a century later no one can say with certainty how many died by her hand—or whether the church she named ever existed at all.
In January 1911, 605 Western Avenue in West Crowley, Louisiana, became the scene of a slaughter that local papers would call “the most brutal murder in the history of this section.” Officer Ballew, first through the door, found Walter Byers, his wife, and their small son still in bed, skulls split wide. The sheets beneath them were heavy with blood. The front door was locked. The killer had come through an open window. There was no hunt for the weapon: in the corner, beside the head of the bed, sat a bucket of blood and a bloodied axe propped against it.
At the opening of the 1910s, those murders began to blaze a path of terror through a cluster of towns strung along the Southern Pacific. Some still point to an earlier crime as the first: Edna Opelousas and her three children, killed in Rayne in November 1909, decapitated and dismembered. The Byers family followed in January 1911.
In February 1911, inside a cabin in Lafayette, another household was destroyed. Crime was no stranger to the poorer quarters of town, yet Sheriff Louis LaCoste and Deputy Coroner Clark were stunned by the staging. The bodies had been posed. Mimi Andrus’s arms were draped over her husband’s shoulders as if in prayer; both knelt. Their children, Joachim and Agnes, lay before them on the bed. The sheets were red with brain, gristle, and gore. Dr. Clark found the bodies still warm. Death had come near midnight. The killer entered and left by the kitchen door.
Lezime Felix, Mimi’s brother, discovered them around 7 a.m. The only early lead was Garcon Godfry, an escaped patient from the asylum at Pineville, less than eighty miles away. He was returned to confinement; his whereabouts were accounted for. Other arrests came to nothing.
Similar killings soon appeared in Texas. Halfway between New Orleans and Houston, the railroad had remade Lafayette’s fortunes; now the Southern Pacific seemed to trace a crimson thread from Cajun country into the Lone Star State.
Attention settled on Raymond Barnabet (also spelled Bernabet), a sharecropper and petty thief who had moved his family from St. Martinville to the rundown side of Lafayette in 1909. The surrounding parishes had been settled in the eighteenth century by the Acadians.
The first solid tip came from his mistress, Diana, after a quarrel. She told a friend there was a connection between Raymond and the murders.
At his trial in October 1911, his children Zepherin and Clementine testified against him. Teenage Clementine described her father coming home one night with blood on his clothes and threatening the household. Zepherin added that their father bragged he had “killed the whole damn Andrus family.” Both said they feared for their lives if he walked free. Raymond was a violent man who beat their mother, Nina Porter, and the children.
While Raymond sat in jail, another family died. On November 26, 1911, Norbert Randall, his wife, their three children, and a nephew were killed by blows behind the right ear with the reverse of an axe blade. Norbert was also shot in the head. A ten-year-old daughter, who had spent the night at an uncle’s house, found them in the morning.
Raymond had an alibi. Clementine did not. She was found near the Randall home in a blue-and-white dress covered in brain and blood. Sheriff LaCoste, already wary of Raymond’s children, arrested them both.
Neighbors—the Stevens family—had called them “filthy, shifty, degenerate.” Blood from the Andrus scene had already been found on Clementine’s clothes when police came for her father; she claimed he had wiped it there. The sheriff was unconvinced. Zepherin produced an alibi. Clementine went to jail.
Her protests of innocence became an admission that she had killed the Randalls with accomplices to “try out” a voodoo charm bought from the hoodoo doctor Joseph Thibodeaux. The story changed a third time: she blamed her father and brother. By the time she took the stand, it had changed a fourth time: she absolved her father and helped spare him a death sentence.
Ohio’s Mahoning Dispatch recorded the scene:
With screams of hysterical laughter the girl rocked back and forth in the witness chair, her great eyes rolling into the back of her head, barely any pupil showing. Amidst sharp commands from the court and quick questioning of the prosecutor, the woman told of how because the Randall family had refused to obey church orders she had crept upon their cabin late on Sunday night with a keen-edged axe concealed in the folds of her cotton wrapper.
She told of how after she had thrown open the door of the tiny cabin she crept upon the sleeping husband and wife and before either could arouse had split their skulls in twain with her death dealing implement. She told how the four children on the floor started to cry out and how stealthy tread she approached their trundle beds and swinging her axe killed two with one blow and then lay about her with quick swings hacking the bodies of the two remaining children until they were scattered in bits about the room.
As she completed the awful tale, she rocked to and fro and then said: ‘An’ judge, thet ain’t all either’.
The next confession concerned the Andrus family, who lived in a lonely section of the parish. They had refused to obey a message from God said to have come through a visiting voodoo doctor. “She, with other religiously crazed [black] fanatics, went to the Andrus cabin in the dead of night and there with axes hacked the sleeping members, four in number, to pieces, ending their bloody orgy with weird prayers and incantations.”
Norbert Randall was brother-in-law to Alexandre Andrus. Both families had been present at meetings of what came to be called the Church of Sacrifice. The murders themselves fell on Sunday nights, after worshippers had worked themselves into frenzy.
That Clementine had directed some killings and taken part in others was offered as an explanation for the differences in method—from neat, almost surgical blows to chaotic bloodletting—and for the fact that the murders continued after her arrest.
In January 1912, Felix Broussard, his wife, and their three children were slaughtered in Lake Charles, farther along the line through Rayne and Crowley. The scene recalled the Andrus murders in its staging and its atmosphere of dark ritual. The Broussards were laid across the sheets, each skull crushed by the blunt of an axe. The weapon lay under the bed. The room was strangely bloodless; gore had been collected in a bucket. Most unsettling were the hands: each finger separated, held splayed with wooden pins and rolled paper. Above the door were the words “Human Five.” On the wall, a bastardized Psalm 9: When He maketh the inquisition for blood He forgetteth not the cry of the humble.
Based on claims from the black community, newspapers seized on voodoo. The El Paso Gazette ran the Broussard story under the headline “Voodoo Horrors Break Out Again,” tying the crimes to human sacrifice and to the number five. “Two months ago, six members of the Wexford family perished at the hands of the fanatics, but one was an infant that had been born only the day before the tragedy and in all probability had not been taken into consideration when the plans for the human sacrifice were consummated,” the reporter wrote. “Now comes the Broussard tragedy with its five victims, thus completing a series of sacrifices of five separate families, each evidently intended to have involved five victims.”
Rumors named Clementine the leader of a cult called the Church of Sacrifice, supposedly overseen by Reverend King Harris, a Pentecostal preacher whose small congregation was connected to the Christ Sanctified Holy Church. Police questioned Harris. He had never heard of such a church and was shaken that his sermons might have been read as license for axe murder.
Lake Charles was far from Lafayette; Beaumont was farther still. On February 19, 1912, Hattie Dove and her three children were left piled almost naked on a bed, each killed by axe blows to the head. Unlike the others, Dove had fought. Furniture was overturned. Bedclothes torn. Blood everywhere, according to the Beaumont Enterprise.
In April 1912, Alfred and Elizabeth Cassaway (also spelled Casaway) and their three children were murdered in the same fashion. Nothing was stolen. The bodies were arranged neatly, almost tenderly, on the linen.
On April 5, 1912, Clementine made a fuller confession, claiming 17 murders. She said she had bought a voodoo charm—sometimes called a candja—to protect her, that she and her accomplices drew lots, and that she disguised herself as a man to move at night. The Daily Picayune noted that “she declared she killed the children because she did not wish them left orphans in the world.” Her deeper motives were never made clear.
The Lafayette Advertiser printed the confession and added: “Clementine’s confession has been received with varying shades of belief owing to the positive way she swore in the trial of her father, and the misleading information she has given as to her accomplices.”
The story would not stay still. She had once sworn her father was the killer; the killings continued. She named accomplices; Sheriff LaCoste’s inquiries went nowhere. Several arrests were made. The search for the rest of the “Human Five Gang” died. District Attorney Howard E. Bruner thought some later crimes were copycats, yet believed Clementine a “moral pervert” guilty of what she confessed—including “caressing” the corpses regardless of age or sex.
On April 11, 1912, Will Burton, who lived at 724 Center Street, San Antonio, along with five members of the family, was killed.
Charges were filed April 14, 1912. In jail, the number rose to 35. Details shifted with each telling.
May 1912 brought Glidden, Texas, between San Antonio and Houston. Ellen Monroe, her four children, and her lover Lyle Funancune were killed in their sleep. Monroe’s fifth child, Parthenia, who lived with her grandmother, found them at 7 a.m. Monroe and Funancune had apparently survived the first blows; their bodies lay beside the bed, not in it.
Sheriff Bruce Mayes and bloodhounds followed tracks to Jim Fields. That morning, while Parthenia howled, Fields washed his shoes and bought tickets to Flatonia, thirty-two miles away. He carried a suspicious amount of cash; his jacket was flecked with blood; his freshly scrubbed boots matched the prints. His wife, Ida Fields, was arrested and released. Charges were later dismissed against her husband.
A pandemic of axe murder seemed to sweep Texas and Louisiana. Black communities held panicked meetings. Young women working as servants slept in employers’ kitchens rather than go home. Men bought guns and rigged fishing-line alarms from doorknobs to toes.
The Utica Saturday Globe reported: “Every cabin door and window is locked and barred, and no family sleeps without a guard. Every ax, every piece of iron, everything which might be used as an instrument of murder, is picked up and carried inside.”
The church—if it had ever been more than rumor and newspaper invention—disbanded, taking clarity with it.
The real death toll remains murky, as folkloric as the beliefs said to have inspired it. Some journalists wrote that as many as three hundred may have been slain by the sect in its various guises over six years. How many deaths belonged to any such cult, how many to Clementine specifically, and how many unrelated crimes were later bundled into the same file will never be entirely clear.
Clementine’s defense pleaded insanity. She stood trial and, at nineteen, was sentenced to life at Angola.
Two weeks after she was sent to the penitentiary, reports came from Lafayette that the entire black population was searching with intent to lynch Zepherin Bernabet, Noah Bernabet, and Severin Guirouard. Their crime was fatally stabbing Walter Caffrey as he was leaving a restaurant.
According to a dozen trustworthy accounts from the black community, the men went through some form of “voodoo” incantations before the attack.
She tried to escape on July 31, 1913, and was caught the same day. Despite that, she was considered a model prisoner. She did not serve long. A brief prison report said she received a “procedure” that “restored” her to her “normal condition,” after which she was released on good behavior after about ten years.
Many facts remain unverified. A later story—circulated but not firmly documented—holds that in 1985 a Louisiana woman visited her 103-year-old great-grandmother and heard the tale of Clementine Barnabet; after the old woman’s death, a youthful portrait was said to match newspaper photographs. If true, she had vanished into a new name. If not, it is only another layer of the fog that still hangs over America’s first widely publicized black female serial-killer case.
By April 1912, some counts put the dead in Louisiana and Texas at forty-nine. The victims were mulattoes or black members of families with mulatto children. Ironically, Cementine was described as a “mulatto girl.”
Robbery was never the motive. On the Broussard night a note remained: “When He maketh the Inquisition for Blood. He forgeteth not the cry of the humble —human five.” Police saw the pattern along the Southern Pacific stops.
Was Clementine’s confession, and the candja charm a witch doctor promised would let them “do as we pleased and we would never be detected,” the only motive? Wholesale slaughter seems a heavy test for a charm. Some accounts suggest the cult’s core belief was that riches could be obtained through human sacrifice. Later killings reached San Antonio. Defectors from the Sacrifice Church, newspapers said, pointed police to Matthew: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hew down, and cast into the fire.”
What remains is the silence after the last axe fell, the locked doors, the posed bodies, and a young woman whose stories never quite agreed with one another—or with the calendar of deaths that continued while she sat in a cell.